Tag Archives: NEA ‘s Purple America/Project Love

“Around Us” was the last part of the quote the title comes from. The next line is “Although we need these boundaries and beliefs to function, we should not take them too seriously.” I suppose that flexibility may be the most succinct definition of the hoped-for Growth Mindset we have encountered yet, but this post is not actually about Carol Dweck. Remember Robert Theobald from our last post? In 1997, still awaiting the long sought revolution, he published yet another book reworking success: new communities at the millenium that laid out in its conclusion the “new belief structure” that would be necessary for a “radically more positive world” where each of us has a “core future commitment to the maintenance and development of social cohesion.”

Since my unusual, but terribly reliable method, of tracking the Common Core via its required actual implementation in schools and classrooms has turned up in just the last week repeated attempts to impose Theobald’s vision, the Baha’i values and compliance vision, and the cybernetic theory of doling out information in a controlled manner to create predictable future behavior we had best move on to the invisible how. Since the last two have been covered in previous posts, let’s see what Theobald thought would be the New Belief Structure in place by 2011. I can assure you in education, radical intentions and methods do not go away. They don’t even always get new names. First though I want to use the guiding belief that we have now seen recurring consistently as the marching banner since the 60s taken this time from Theobald (quoting Pope John Paul II from 1994):

“If in his providence God had given the earth to humanity, that meant that he had given it to everyone. Therefore the riches of creation were to be considered as a common good of the whole of humanity. Those who possessed these goods as personal property were really only stewards,…since it was God’s will that created goods which serve everyone in a just way.”

Inspirational man, but somehow his sense of where wealth actually comes from was clearly warped. Anyway, this sentiment provides the perfect rationale for massive redistribution both within affluent countries and from rich to poor countries with no thought that anything vital might vanish in the process. Theobald turned this into a fundamental global governing “idea that great wealth and deep poverty were unacceptable in a just society.” He sold the idea that this New Belief Structure should become “one of the great rallying points for a changed vision adopted by a growing segment of the population.” Yes and continued intentional mind arson and perspective shifting as the mission of K-12 and higher ed combined with weak job growth and explosive student debt only drives the allure of that same rallying cry now.

Central to this New Belief Structure and New Images of Citizenship in what Theobald called “common ground work” was:

a)controlling our ego needs and growth beyond them;

b) learning to screen reality through our own senses and the stories and myths we have learned;

c) emphasizing our collective intelligence and using our diversity to support the emergence of new systems;

d) acknowledging the importance of spirituality; and

e) “Recognizing the importance of using values–honesty, responsibility, humility, love, faith, cooperation, and a respect for mystery–as a compass that guides our choices.”

Values again. That common core we keep encountering globally. Guess where I found it just this week as an agenda item on a recent School Board Working Agenda in the Metro Atlanta School District with the duplicitous Conversion Charter we have looked at? In the new Student Code of Conduct. When parents sign off at the beginning of the year that they have seen the Student Handbook and agree to abide by it, they will now actually be signing off on listed “Character Traits” with language about desired values and morals and ethics without likely appreciating the wholesale transformation from the inside-out they have just sanctioned in their children.

SPLC is clearly engaged in a coordinated effort to prevent people from accurately perceiving admitted facts and declared intentions. We can think of Common Core as the Means to a Quiet Revolution and a Tool to Alter People’s Values, Attitudes, and Beliefs. Agenda 21 and Catastrophic Manmade Global Warming are the Excuses for Why the Transformations are Necessary and Tools to Control Physical Space and People’s Behavior. I can wish more of the critics SPLC cites were paying attention to the objections I am carefully laying out, but anyone’s accurate reporting of openly declared intentions or coursework is not theorizing about conspiracies. So what is SPLC really up to?

Remember how I call Common Core an explanation ‘bucket’ that obscures all the real intended changes like Positive School Climates, making social and emotional learning the primary focus, or making education about using a digital device instead of academic knowledge? Classic Bait and Switch has been my drumbeat in my book and now on this blog. I knew SPLC had created a racially oriented and economic justice focused curriculum. http://www.splcenter.org/what-we-do/teaching-tolerance What I did not know until I started looking into their incentives to issue such misleading reports was that SPLC had partnered with the NEA to create TDSI–Teaching Diverse Students Initiative or that SPLC was partnering with the accreditors of teacher ed institutions to ensure its adoption in all teaching credential programs. Lots of incentive, in other words, for the SPLC to malign critics of effective tools for wholesale radical transformations.

Basically what SPLC is obscuring is the heart of the actual planned implementation in classrooms across the US under the mischievous banner of the Common Core and what now counts as Student Achievement and Growth. How about working with Glenn Singleton to create ‘dispositions’ in students pursuant to “Beginning Courageous Conversations about Race”? That can be one of the Character Traits district administrators now get to require from students under those new mischievous codes of conduct.

Recognizing the intended mischief from Fulton’s proposed new Code of Student Conduct and having asked detailed questions of administrators to make sure I understood precisely what was to be imposed, I came home to think about the potential for that Character Trait Code given what I knew of Fulton’s Charter, accreditation, and the intentions of TDSI. file:///D:/Downloads/PRRAC%20-%20Race%20_%20Racism.htm Not to pat myself on the back, but it really is no exaggeration to say I speak ed fluently and usually understand the underlying theories now better than all the edudoctorates in the room. After all, most of them now are credentialed because of what they are willing to do to us and our children and this great nation, not for what they actually know.

The phrase–“Student’s Quantity of time on task engaged in desired behavior” may earn a doctorate these days when repeated constantly, but it probably should not be spoken out loud to parents. It does sound like social engineering. Nor should “Nothing as valuable as a good theory for social change” Kurt Lewin be quoted by name publicly as an example of the useful Freeze, Unfreeze, Refreeze behavioral manipulation strategy to deal with current teachers not on board with the technology shift.

If administrators think it’s OK to coercively brainwash adults, just imagine the plight of the children entrusted to their care in a world where changing the child is now the whole point of what is student achievement. Anyway, nobody can say I do not put my angst about where education is going and what the inevitable consequences will be to fruitful use. Yes indeed. Within an hour after leaving that meeting, I had the CARE Guide the NEA created with SPLC to “move beyond the restructuring of schools to the ‘re-culturing of education.” http://www.nea.org/assets/docs/CAREguide2011.pdf

That would be the real focus of K-12 that SPLC needed to protect. It explains the importance of Core Values to the Vision. That would of course be the vision “Creating Change through Social Justice” and dramatically redefining the purpose of schools and negating academics as traditionally understood. Unless it is useful for new purposes like preparing students for everyday life, or perceiving ‘power relationships,’ or learning to exalt the ‘collectivist perspective’ and reject the ‘individualist perspective.’

We have a lot to talk about that is to be done under the cover of what counts as Excellence or a legally required closure of the Achievement Gap. It’s not what we are expecting and it certainly is something we need to fear as long as we remain unaware.

I have run too long again. Next time we will walk through that 174 page core document together.

For those of you who never took a psychology course and never helped turn BF Skinner’s troubling books into bestsellers, operant conditioning was his idea on training people so that their behavior would be as programmed and predictable as a homing pigeon. Skinner always thought K-12 education had great potential as a social programming device. In the 80s the systems theorists decided that systems thinking would make a stealthier, more effective and lasting, means for operant conditioning. Simply target values, attitudes, and beliefs via the classroom and you impact future behavior decisively.

That targeting was what was going on in the Outcomes Based Education (OBE) controversies in the 90s. Looking at the 2012 Camp Snowball presentations and the flyers for the Summer 2012 Teaching for Excellence training sessions it appears to me to be updated operant conditioning techniques under new names from people like Spence Rogers and Peter Senge with ties to OBE. Engage even the most resistant student!

Plus this week the US Department of Ed announced that it would award 10 bonus points to any district applying for the $400 million of your tax dollars or future indebtedness in the so-called Race to the Top district competition that included “plans to work with public and private partners to help improve the social, emotional and behavioral needs of students.” Ah, comrade, may I suggest the unbelievably well-connected Responsive Classroom we profiled here http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/locusts-of-the-mind-boring-gaping-holes-altering-wiring-and-living-on-our-dime/ .

The Ed Week article dated October 19, 2012 (after the national Presidential Polls began to suggest that Arne Duncan may be out of a job in January and unable to continue to shepherd these mind and personality altering plans in person. Best to award grants so the dedicated political minions in the respective district central offices can continue the practices whoever wins on November 6. I mean who will know?) states that these bonus points could make all the difference. Apparently 900 school districts applied already and only 15 to 25 grants will be awarded. Applications are due October 30, the week before the election. So there is still time for a scheming Super to file that amendment and sell future voters into mental servitude. Part of the democratic purposes of schooling indeed.

Now I have been warning you all summer about the dominance of social and emotional learning in the real Common Core implementation and PBIS coming in through federal disabilities law mandates and the ASCD’s Whole Child Initiative and the NEA’s Purple America/Project Love. I have also been trumpeting the unappreciated psychological components of new state definitions of student Growth (especially CO, NC and NV) and Student Achievement. The district Race to the Top requirements give a perfect example of what has really been the rationale for all these so-called reforms. Mandate SEL or measures designed to destroy the Axemaker Mind and fund alternative means of measuring the outcomes of what is to be going on in these classrooms to gain the desired future political mindset and likely behaviors. Here’s a quote from the Ed Week article again:

“Districts must pay some attention to students’ physical and mental health regardless of whether they shoot for the bonus points. Districts must propose measures of age-appropriate growth in other areas, including at least one health or social-emotional indicator for students in 4th through 8th grades as well as a similar indicator for high school students. For its youngest students, a district must propose at least one age appropriate non-cognitive indicator of growth–for which the department offers physical well-being and motor development or social-emotional development as hypotheticals.”

So the same administrators intent on stopping lecturing of facts and who insist that reading be taught inefficiently through a whole word sight approach will get to pick what social and emotional characteristics children will need for the future. You know that collectivist future where the economy has been designated an ecosystem and redesigned around Sustainability and the Common Good we have been profiling? Because that is what is going on in those professional development sessions we are not invited to.

I know because every day a certain portion of mystified teachers leave those meetings and do online searches of the terms and concepts they found most troubling or mystifying. Or both. Guess whose doorstep the searches gravitate to? There is evil afoot and the teachers seem to have a greater radar detector for the mischief than the administrators. Their bosses. Perhaps because too many are drawn to administration after they proved to not be very good at teaching subjects. Now they have power and our tax money and a federal government and its cronies intent on using education to mount a political coup. For Equality!! One that is supposed to survive a change in White House occupancy or a shift in a state’s governor or a loss of control of Congress.

This week the horrifically politicized National Academy of Sciences continued its efforts to make Lysenko seem like a scheming piker when it comes to using political power to destroy the natural sciences for political reasons. This report, called “Climate Change Education, Formal Settings, K-14” announced the intention to use education to stamp out widespread skepticism over Climate Change. Our modern-day political officers have determined that a belief in catastrophic man-made temperature increases is in the best interests of their future plans for transforming the US away from free market capitalism and individualism.

The report contemplates that the new Science Standards issued in the name of Common Core will be very controversial. That would be consistent with what we have already discussed in our systems thinking stories that the West and the US especially is being pushed away from the science of the Enlightenment and a distinction between the natural sciences and the social sciences. In their place we are to get the UN pushed (and Marxist belief) in a Unified Science as well as what the Chinese call Experience Science grounded in a Confucianist belief that there should not be such a distinction between people and nature. Which sounds a great deal like what Thomas Berry and the ecologists are pushing that we profiled here. http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/we-need-a-radical-change-in-our-mode-of-consciousness-even-a-new-sense-of-being-human/

So we are to get a new definition of Science no matter the controversy from those with the proper ed credentials and we must believe in Man-made Catastrophic Climate Change whatever the actual temperature trends or real causes. But since that might become the source of controversy if it was a discrete segment of a particular school subject, the report suggests using Systems Thinking to instill the desired beliefs and to make Systems Thinking a part of all academic coursework.

Now I keep flashing back to visions of the Marxist-Leninist political officer in the movie The Hunt for Red October. “Comrades! First it was my job to make sure the schoolchildren and future voters had the desired political beliefs we find conducive to ruling over you and dictating what you are to do and what you may become. In case all those years of Soviet schooling did not take as we wanted, people like me are put in places of power to monitor adult decision-making that contradicts our glorious empowering ideology.”

No, that was not part of the movie but those political officers were a very real part of how the Soviet Union or Mao’s China operated. And how different really is this planned social and emotional and psychological assault and data gathering to gain desired political beliefs via our schools in the West and Paul Ehrlich’s Newmindedness and the collectivist belief in the Common Good from the last post?

Our schools. Our children. Our tax dollars. Are we really defenseless to stop this blatant assault on our individual freedom and the economic system that brought unprecedented prosperity to the average person? Unsurpassed in the history of humanity?